Case Discussion

This case is a young female with no history of high impact sport activity, giving history of exceedingly difficult full range of hip movements, particularly painful on right side. In our experience the femoral head and acetabular contour conforms to subtle developmentally dysplastic hip morphology. These individuals due to nonobvious symptoms and signs escape detection in early years and later develop labral injuries secondary to wear and tear at the hip during late adolescence to young adulthood. As seen above partly uncovered femoral heads (which is described as an extrusion index by some authors), is accompanied by a full thickness anterior labral tear and a paralabral cyst at the right acetabulum.

Very infrequently a tear or small paralabral cyst ,like this, may be confused with a normal prelabral sulcus or recess at the articular labral margin, which is usually quite sharply marginated and along only one-third or rarely one-half the thickness of the labrum.